Linebacker Reed fierce on the field, calm off it

Brooks Reed doesn’t sound like a football player. In conversations, the long-haired young linebacker is almost Zen-like, as soft spoken and gentle as a man can be.

Humble, too. Ask him about how seamlessly he adjusted from college to the NFL despite a position change and an offseason lockout that kept him from doing any pre-training camp prep work with the Texans, and he responds by shaking his head, insisting the transition was anything but a breeze.

“Actually,” Reed said, “it wasn’t easy for me.”
The evidence, of course, suggests otherwise. The second-round draft pick, a defensive end at the University of Arizona, became the emergency starter at left outside linebacker five weeks into his rookie season when Mario Williams suffered a season-ending torn pectoral muscle. Over the next 13 games — the final two of them in the Texans’ playoff debut — Reed was in on 10 sacks and made 36 unassisted tackles.

Remember Teddy Roosevelt’s mantra about “talking softly but carrying a big stick?” That was Reed in 2011. No Texan outperformed others’ expectations like he did. But that doesn’t mean he satisfied his own.

“My coaches have communicated to me that I have a lot more room for improvement,” Reed said, “so that’s what I’m looking to do.”

Mature approach
Defensive coordinator Wade Phillips pointed out how “Brooks really gets upset with himself if he doesn’t get something exactly right. He wants to be perfect. If he doesn’t make a play, he’s pretty hard on himself.”
However, Reed doesn’t show it by screaming and cussing and jumping around like a petulant teenager or, for that matter, a typical football player.

“No, no,” Phillips said. “You have to be around him a little while to notice (when he’s upset). He’s one you don’t have to correct very often because he corrects himself.”

Reggie Herring, the vociferous linebackers coach whose animated personality is at the opposite end of the spectrum from Reed’s, offers a simple explanation for the player’s outward equanimity.
“He’s just a nice kid with a lot of maturity and a great work ethic,” Herring said.

Reed also has lots of tangible stuff in his favor.

“As I understand it,” Herring said, “he’s the strongest player on our team (pound for pound). What he brought here was play strength, and that’s the foundation of this game. You see a lot of guys come in and fall or falter early because they’re not able to handle the physicality of the NFL.”

Or the mental pressure. Reed concluded the best way to avoid pitfalls was through preparation. Because Phillips and Herring had coached DeMarcus Ware in Dallas and Ware had 60 sacks in his four seasons with them — in the same system Reed was being asked to learn on the fly — he concluded without being told that being a DeMarcus Ware film buff made sense.

Linebacker skills, body
Besides a surfeit of muscle and brain power, Reed possesses the kind of instincts that translate into quick feet, or what Herring calls “great get-off. At the (scouting) combine, I believe he had the fastest first 10 yards of any backer in the group. Not the fastest for 40 yards, just the first 10 — when it matters.”

Herring also talked about Reed’s “linebacker body.”

“That’s where people get discombobulated with him,” Herring said. “Look, he’s 6-2½, 250. The fact that he was playing with his hand in the dirt (the three-point stance of a defensive end) in college turned him into a ‘tweener’ to some people. But he was always a ‘Mike’ linebacker to us. Half the teams in the draft wanted him bad, and the other half didn’t think he could (make the transition). We were in the half that saw the upside potential. He’s still projecting and growing as a player. The sky’s the limit.”